French – Koba English

No et moi

I’m unsure how Delphine de Vigan’s No et moi ended up on my TBR. The best I can surmise is that it was mentioned in an issue of Karavan, which is where I get most of my French language recommendations. But as luck would have it, someone in the neighborhood buy-nothing group was giving away a copy in French and I was the only one who wanted it.

No et moi is the story of what happens when Lou, a precocious 13-year-old, befriends a young homeless woman named Nolwenn, or just “No.”

Spoilers abound here, even though the book has been out for nearly twenty years, because I think the spoilers matter a lot in the experience and because the ending is what I want to talk about the most. Assume the spoilers apply for the 2010 movie, too, though I haven’t seen it.

I mentioned in my international WhatsApp book club that I was reading this book, now that I’d finished Varats olidliga lätthet, and another member asked me what I thought of it, since she’d read it too. I was at the halfway point of the book when I answered:

So far I’d say it’s only okay, it feels a little…saccharine? I like how she writes, Lou is a very charming narrator, but the Feel Good vibe makes me dubious.

Because at this point in the book, everything is going right. No helps Lou with her presentation on young homeless women, and despite her skyrocketing anxiety Lou aces it. Lou’s parents agree to let No move in with them and they love her. She’s able to help coax Lou’s mother out of the severe depression that she fell into after the loss of a younger daughter to SIDS. The process of helping No also brings Lou into closer contact with her crush and popular boy Lucas, who just so happens to have an entire apartment more or less to himself following an implausible series of events: a father who ran away to Brazil and a mother who decided to move in with another man but occasionally returns to the apartment to see her son. (This is the part of the review where I’m most likely to have stuck my foot in my mouth, because it’s always this kind of happenstance that actually happens in real life, even if it sounds absurd in a book.) Lou has skipped a couple of grades—and I think Lucas had to repeat a year or two?—so he’s old enough to quasi-responsibly live by himself, but still. The convenience is a bit much.

Then the shit hits the fan. No finds a not-entirely-legal job cleaning at a hotel, which often ends up with her working extra hours in the bar, and soon she’s back to drinking and (presumably) prostitution. Lou even catches her stealing some of her mother’s pills, but says nothing. No looks up her mother and tries to visit her, but the childhood trend of rejection continues and No’s mother refuses to open the door to her daughter. The bottom finally falls out when Lou and her parents go to visit a freshly divorced aunt. Without the structure of family life, without Lou, No tailspins. She fails to call and check in with them after a few days, the phone goes unanswered, and they come home to find No in such a state that Lou’s parents ask her to leave. From their perspective, No isn’t a safe person for their young daughter to be around.

Lucas to the rescue! They move No in with him, but it’s rough work keeping No’s presence hidden from the weekly cleaning lady. No’s condition isn’t improving, if anything it’s getting worse, and finally Lucas’s mother cottons on that something is happening and announces a visit. No calls Lou and begs her to help her with her plan to move to Ireland. By now, Lou’s relationship with her parents is at an all-time low. She’s been lying to them about where she’s been after school, and despite her mother’s return to relative normalcy, the relationship between mother and daughter is still frosty and stilted. From Lou’s perspective, her mother doesn’t love her, never treats her with warmth or affection or encouragement. Might as well go with No!

This trip to Ireland has long been in the making. No’s plan has always been to move there to find her crush? childhood sweetheart? Loïc, who she claims works in a bar and lives in a fantastic country manor and has been writing her piles and piles of letters about his life, encouraging her to come join him. Now, she tells Lou, she’s finally saved up enough money to go. They spend the day shopping (to Lou’s misgivings, as she expects No is overplaying how much money she actually has) and then finally take the subway to gare Saint-Lazare, where No tells Lou they’ll switch trains to continue their journey to Ireland. Instead, No ditches Lou, who has to walk all the way back home.

No completely drops off the face of the earth. Lou finally has the relationship she wants with her mother. Lucas and Lou find out from a friend of No’s that Loïc never sent her a single letter; she only found out where he was working by happenstance. The book ends with a kiss between Lucas and Lou.

The mood whiplash with the visit to Lou’s aunt was impossible for me to square with what came before. So much in the early story defied expectations, even reality, that you start to think you’re in for some light feel-good fare. Then I expected some friction when No moved in with Lou, and that the conflict would be learning to adjust to a new life and new routines, or maybe struggling with guilt, but no: everything is perfect. By the time No starts to struggle, your only thought is, ah hah, finally, here’s the conflict, but all of the other problems in the book so far have been solved so this one will be, too.

No et moi won the prix des Libraires, so it clearly has some cultural cachet. And I want to stress that it’s written beautifully. de Vigan captures the voice of a gifted, anxious child perfectly, striking that difficult balance between intellectual and emotional capacity without condescension on the one hand or making them into a tiny adult on the other. After all, no matter how bright a 13-year-old is, they’re still 13 years old. But the limits of Lou’s first-person perspective is maybe part of what makes the mood whiplash so strong. We learn, eventually, about No’s traumatic childhood, and so we can assume that her homelessness and her alcoholism are connected to those early years, but being told that isn’t the same as being in No’s head or living in No’s own feelings. Nor do we even see previews of that trauma in the beginning; there’s no foreshadowing of what’s to come. Instead No just drops in like a cursed fairy godmother to bring Lou everything she wants before disappearing into the ether.

Varats olidliga lätthet

I was particularly interested in the International WhatsApp Book Club selection for August, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (which I read in Swedish: Varats olidliga lätthet), because it’s a long-time favorite of my Bloomsday book buddy and in all the years I’ve known him he’s proven to have impeccable taste. Once again, he didn’t let me down!

Lätthet follows four interconnected people around the time of the Prague Spring and some years beyond: Tomas, his wife Tereza, his friend and lover Sabine, and Sabine’s lover Franz. The timeline is slightly disjointed: we learn about a character’s death in one section, and then the next section will circle back to the same character several years before and follow what happened to them up until their death. All of this is held together with the glue of intense philosophizing, either on the part of the perspective character or of a nameless and unconnected first-person narrator who we can only assume is the author and therefore Milan Kundera himself interjecting. (As opposed to the perspective-shifting in Lol V. Stein, where the first-person narrator is most decidedly not Duras or any otherworldly author.)

The story and the characters exist solely as case studies or tools for Kundera to engage in philosophizing, but he still manages to capture distinct and nuanced personalities rather than flat stereotypes. There’s nothing more exhausting in a book than a blowhard author using characters as puppets in little morality plays; perhaps the difference between Kundera and a blowhard is that Kundera raises and debates questions he doesn’t seem to have an answer to, while a blowhard almost by definition has decided they have all the answers.

The Swedish translation was from Ulla Bruncrona, and I have nothing to add about the translation itself. Mostly I want to remark that out of nowhere J. M. G. Le Clézio has decided to haunt me. I’d never heard of him until a book friend mentioned him last week and it’s been a bit of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon since. The day after that conversation, I finally got around to starting a French novel I had picked up weeks ago from our neighborhood buy-nothing group, only to be greeted with an epigraph from Le Clézio, and now in writing this up, I’ve learned that Ulla Bruncrona is his primary Swedish translator. Well then, universe. I’ll give Le Clézio priority in my TBR.

Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein

Marguerite Duras, my beloved weirdo! I can always count on you when I’m falling behind in my French reading.

On its face, a simple chain of events: Lol V. Stein, a bit of an aloof and withdrawn odd duck, falls madly in love with Michael Richardson, who abandons her at the town ball for an older woman. Lol is heartbroken and suffers a nervous breakdown, but eventually marries Jean Bedford and moves away. They have three daughters together, and while Lol has kept a very strictly regimented life throughout their entire marriage, Jean is always worried that Lol hasn’t fully recovered from the incident. Ten years later, they return to Lol’s childhood home for Jean’s job, and Lol manufactures a meeting with her schoolgirl friend Tatiana. The two of them fell out of touch after Lol’s breakdown, largely due to the orchestrations of Lol’s mother, so they haven’t spoken in ten years. Tatiana is now married to a surgeon, and having an affair with one of his subordinates, Jacques. Lol and Tatiana have an awkward reunion, at turns warm and cruel, and things reach their peak when Lol and Jacques travel to the resort town where Lol had been jilted all those years ago. The two of them spend the night there, Jacques is in love with Lol, Lol wants him to continue seeing Tatiana, maybe he also loves Tatiana too, Lol kind of spies on them during their assignations, it’s a mess because that’s all Marguerite Duras writes and I’m here for it. And as usual the ending leaves nothing settled: Jacques is waiting for Tatiana at their usual no-tell motel, Lol is hiding in the rye field outside their window, that’s it, the end!

The fun part of this is how Duras plays with perspective. Much of the story is presented as a third-person omniscient narrator, even though the narrative never lets us forget that it’s actually a first-person account. Sometimes the narrator is involved in what’s happening in the story, sometimes they relay what other people have told them, sometimes they state flat-out that they’re imagining or hypothesizing. The “reveal,” such as it is, takes some time and gives everything a bit of extra tension.

The parallel translation I had with me was Lol V. Steins hänförelse, by the controversial Katarina Frostenson. It’s hard to think of her anymore without also thinking about the Swedish Academy scandal, Jean-Claude Arnault and corruption. Is that entirely fair? Who’s to say? But speaking of, now seems like a good moment to recommend Matilda Voss Gustavsson’s The Club. It’s still commercially unavailable in English but a sample translation seems to be floating around in the literary circles, so maybe one day it’ll be picked up.

Vacation Reading List: Kiruna

By the time this post goes live, I’ll be sitting on a train to? from? Boden, en route to Kiruna for an eleven-day break from the grind. My plan is to visit the big hole in the ground, maybe take in a couple museums, and catch up on my reading backlog. To that end, my list!

Resan till Armenien, Osip Mandelstam

This was a recommendation from a book friend. I started it back in February but quickly realized I would want the time to really focus on it, in part due to lots of new vocabulary. That time has come.

Livet måste ha mening, Victor Frankl

A democratically chosen book for the philosophy reading group I’m in. Unfortunately I find that as the group grows larger, the suggestions devolve into academically dubious pseudo-intellectual New Age claptrap. But I’ll still read this to see for myself! And to remind the group members who suggested this that Frankl was out there trepanning suicidal Jewish people from 1940 to 1942.

Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Marguerite Duras

I am far, far behind on my French reading goal for the year. Duras to the rescue! I’ll also be reading the Swedish translation.

Bastarden från Istanbul, Elif Shafak

The July pick for my international WhatsApp book club. It’s the longest book on this list, so we’ll see if I finish it or even get around to it.

Wind, Sand and Stars

When I first read Le petit prince, I was in my author-obsessive phase and so immediately decided to find other books by de Saint-Exupéry. The high school library had Wind, Sand and Stars and I gave it a shot, but for one reason or another didn’t get more than a couple pages in before I gave up.

Then, last year on a trip back home, I saw a beat-up old copy at the Little Free Library someone had established on the porch of the post office. Why not try again? I picked it up, along with one or two others, and took them back to Sweden with me.

Now, a year later, I read it! Halfway through the year and this was the first book to qualify for my physical library quota. Oops.

I’m in the process of comparing the translation to the French original (which my local library happened to carry, hooray!). I’m not sure if substantial changes were made for the English translation, or if there are multiple editions available, because there are ten chapters in English and only eight in French, and I’m not sure that all eight of the French are even part of the English. As of writing I sat down and started re-reading one of the chapters that appears in both books, and even between those there are substantial differences. Whole paragraphs appear in the English that are nowhere to be seen in the French. Did Lewis Galantière take huge liberties with his translation? Was the French revised from one edition to the next? Unfortunately at the time of writing I’m practically on my way out the door so I’ll have to leave that question for another time.

As it exists in English, Wind, Sand and Stars doesn’t hit in the same way that Le petit prince does. There’s plenty of adventure and lyricism about the act of flying, the psychology of being a pilot…but there’s also plenty of French imperialism. You can expect or write off certain things as being “of their time” (and the original French came out in 1939), but when you have in your head the sensitivity, curiosity, and nuance of Le petit prince, it’s a bit of a shock to stumble across de Saint-Exupéry’s complete lack of interest in the Bedouins he describes—of its time or otherwise. To the extent he gives them any thought at all, it’s not much more than stereotype; French superiority isn’t ever stated outright but it’s there as background radiation.

That’s the only fly in the ointment, but unfortunately it’s a pretty big one. Big enough to chuck the book into the memory hole? No, of course not. But certainly big enough to detract from the magic of the rest of the book—including the near-fatal crash in the Sahara that led, years later, to Le petit prince, where de Saint-Exupéry and his mechanic were rescued from certain death by a passing Bedouin.

En attendant la montée des eaux

As can be inferred from the sparse updates here, I haven’t finished many books lately. This is attributable to being busy with work but also the fact that the book I was most recently trying to get through was Maryse Condé‘s En attendant la montée des eaux. According to my check-out dates from the library, I started this one back in February. My tardy pace is no way any fault of Condé’s, since I was engrossed in her writing and the story from the beginning—it’s always the natural consequence of reading in French.

I first became aware of Condé through a short biography in one of Karavan’s 2024 issues following her death last April. Now and again the journal will include one of these retrospectives on the death of a particular favorite (of the magazine’s editorial staff? of the Swedish literati?), which is a handy if somewhat grim way for me to discover new authors. Stockholm library has a fairly wide offering of her books in the original French, so I could get started right away. I put Moi, Tituba sorcière… on my Storygraph TBR, but mostly as a placeholder for any Condé book. En attendant… happened to be the first and easiest one to find.

En attendant la montée des eaux follows obstetrician Babakar, a Malian now residing in Guadeloupe, in the chaos surrounding his surprise adoption of an orphaned infant. In the middle of a dark and stormy night, the young Movar appears on Babakar’s doorstep and asks him assist in an emergency birth. The child’s father is unknown, though presumed murdered back in Haiti; the mother, an undocumented Haitian migrant named Reinette, dies in childbirth before Babakar can do anything to save her. Still scarred by the loss of his beloved wife and their unborn child to political violence back in Africa, Babakar takes it upon himself to adopt the newborn and names her Anaïs. This act promptly throws his life into disarray: the native Guadeloupeans, who had never been fond of him but who take an even dimmer view of Haitian immigrants, slowly abandon his practice, while as far as the local Haitians are concerned Babakar has stolen one of their children. On top of this, Babakar’s closest confidante and only friend passes away shortly afterwards. It’s not surprising, then, that when Movar returns and demands that Babakar bring Anaïs to Haiti in accordance with the wishes of her dying mother, Babakar just shrugs his shoulders and decides, “why not?” Once in Haiti, Babakar quickly settles in with Movar’s family: his friend and mentor Fouad and two younger sisters, Jahina and Myriam.

This sets up the various stories, long and short, that take up the bulk of the book. This is really my only criticism, which isn’t really a criticism as such but more an observation: Anaïs is absent for most of the book, and when she does appear, Babakar doesn’t really seem to be parenting her all that much, no matter how much we are assured by the narration that she is the light of his life. This makes sense structurally, because the story of Babakar and Anaïs is the set dressing for bringing the ensemble cast together. At a rough estimate I would say that at least a third, maybe half, of En attendant... consists of flashbacks from Babakar as well as the various secondary characters: Movar, the Haitian migrant who had been desperately in love with Reinette and who had been the one to bring Babakar into things; Movar’s friend and mentor Fouad, a Palestinian chef and would-be poet exiled from Lebanon to Haiti; Reinette’s estranged sister Estrella; Estrella’s jilted lover Roji. Together they give Condé an excuse to present these different narratives alongside each other in one book. But this structure has a weird side effect where all of the present-day scenes involving Anaïs feel a bit like an afterthought.

I’m not alone in this sentiment, it seems. The first thing I do after finishing a book is to see what other people thought of it, not because I don’t have an opinion of my own but because it’s always gratifying to see someone validate your own take. Other times, a reviewer will level a particular piece of criticism that makes me stop and reflect on my own experience of the book: do I agree or disagree? In this case, a lot of other readers felt the story dragged. While I can understand why other people might feel that way, I personally didn’t. Perhaps this is in part a marketing issue, as the English summary of the book suggests a much more breathless, nail-biting story than what takes place:

Babakar is a doctor living alone, with only the memories of his childhood in Mali. In his dreams, he receives visits from his blue-eyed mother and his ex-lover Azelia, both now gone, as are the hopes and aspirations he’s carried with him since his arrival in Guadeloupe. Until, one day, the child Anaïs comes into his life, forcing him to abandon his solitude. Anaïs’s Haitian mother died in childbirth, leaving her daughter destitute―now Babakar is all she has, and he wants to offer this little girl a future. Together they fly to Haiti, a beautiful, mysterious island plagued by violence, government corruption, and rebellion. Once there, Babakar and his two friends, the Haitian Movar and the Palestinian Fouad, three different identities looking for a more compassionate world, begin a desperate search for Anaïs’s family.

“Desperate” is not quite the word I would use. Anaïs’s family consists solely of Estrella, who proves trivially easy to track down. To the extent any search in this story is desperate, it’s the living’s search for the dead: Movar’s search for Reinette, and then later Jahina and Myriam’s search for Movar. Desperation? Absolutely. Just not the kind advertised on the back of the book.

Likewise, a lot of people were put off by the seemingly relentless tragedy. Maybe the fact that I crawled through the book over the course of three months helped in this regard, as I never felt overwhelmed by all of the (and this is a technical term) bummer shit. Upon reflection, of course, I’d say that yeah, of course En attendant… is filled with a lot of bummer shit. It’s about colonialism, about neoliberalism, about power; you can’t tackle these subjects and keep everything sunshine and roses. Again, this might have been a case of false advertising, though more subtly: to my reading that English summary is making a promise that the story doesn’t really keep. I don’t know that Babakar, Movar, or Fouad would say that they were looking for a more compassionate world as such, and I don’t think they’ve found one by the end of the book, either.

But if it’s a book filled with tragedy, then Condé keeps a light enough touch throughout that (for me) it never comes across as relentless. I’m a cynical, jaded reader, and I consider myself highly sensitive (maybe even oversensitive) to even the slightest impression of tragedy wielded as a blunt tool of emotional manipulation. I’m not here for your teenage cancer patients and their romance, John Green, and I think it was tacky of you to write the book in the first place. In En attendant… the deaths and devastation are presented as plain facts of life, inevitable occurrences on a long enough timeline. In a brief aside, for example, Babakar has failed to save the miscarriage of a young teenage mother (fifteen years old, the book tells us). The mother is described as exhibiting both relief and a false display of mourning, but then Condé adds, off-handedly, that the girl’s relief would be short lived because not much later she would find herself pregnant again. In a single sentence, the enormity of this event is deflated and the whole thing becomes almost blasé.

This perspective is maybe a natural consequence of Condé’s narrative ambivalence. Not ideological ambivalence, to be clear: political violence and instability only leads to suffering, especially for those at the bottom. No one advocating for such is portrayed sympathetically, regardless of who they claim to represent. But narrative ambivalence in terms of what is fact and what is fiction, what is the true nature of events. While nothing in En attendant… is quite as drastic as in, say, “In a Bamboo Grove,” Condé often presents us with parallel narratives or interpretations of events that are so precisely weighed that either (or both) could be true. Babakar’s nightly visits from his mother are treated as factual events, but Haitian vodoun practitioners consistently fail to work any similar miracles for characters in the novel. Babakar unearths a variety of accounts of his wife’s death, all of which are unsatisfactory but all of which could equally be true. Fouad dreams of being a poet and subtly boasts about his natural talent, but we never read any of his work and only have Babakar’s thoroughly nonplussed response by which to judge Fouad’s work. Estrella’s account of herself and her life is not entirely incompatible with what we hear about her from Roji, even if in one story she’s the heroine and another the villain—and then she dies before we can learn more to judge for ourselves.

The Swedish translation from Helena Böhme was well done. There are brief conversations throughout the book in Creole, posing an extra problem to solve: even if the translator herself can decode them, how to present them to the reader? Böhme opted to keep the original and then present a Swedish translation in brackets, which I think is the optimal way to present both the difference between Creole and French (the class difference, the Self/Other difference) and the translated meaning. There’s also a list of Caribbean and West African terms at the back that Böhme chose not to render in Swedish at all. Some of them seemed simple enough that she could have included the explanation in the text, I thought, but others were more complex or abstract. The English translation is from Condé’s husband, Richard Philcox, and was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Even though I didn’t read it, I assume you’re in good hands there.

Trois femmes puissantes

After I fell in love with Marie NDiaye through La Vengeance m’appartient, I was thrilled to find out that the Stockholm library also had Trois femmes puissantes. In French, Swedish, and English to boot!

I racked up a late fee in excess of SEK 200 in order to really suck the marrow out of this one, though there were long periods where I just didn’t have the time or the mental capacity to engage with French. My insistence on reading sections in French, then Swedish (Ragna Essén, translator), then English (John Fletcher, translator), then French again means that the 230-odd pages ballooned into nearly 1,000 pages. I forgive myself! Even if this very nearly tanked my French reading goals for 2024!

Trois femmes puissantes is a collection of character sketches of three women whose lives are (possibly?) loosely intertwined. First we have Norah, a successful lawyer who has returned to her father in Senegal on an urgent matter—mounting the legal defense of her beloved brother, who stands accused of killing his stepmother with whom he’d been having an affair. Then we have Fanta, though her story is told through the perspective of Rudi, her French husband. We meet the couple destitute in France, several years after being forced to leave Senegal. Finally we have Khady Demba, a young Senegalese widow who finds herself forced to emigrate to Europe.

The thematic elements of parent-child relationships and the ripple effects of toxic masculinity connect all three stories, though there are hints or more explicit material links as well. We actually first meet Khady in Norah’s story, as a domestic worker in her father’s house. Norah’s father acquired and then lost a substantial amount of wealth through the ownership of a tourist village in Dakar—one that Rudi’s father may or may not have been engaged in constructing. (NDiaye doesn’t make it clear either way; I decided to read it that way because it gives a nice symmetry and mutuality to all the relationships among the women.) And finally, we learn that Fanta is a distant relation of Khady, and it’s the prospect of Fanta’s imagined wealth in France that sets Khady on the road to Europe.

Like in La Vengeance m’appartient, NDiaye leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Norah’s and Fanta’s stories end fairly inconclusively: we don’t know the outcome of Norah’s trial, we don’t know whether Rudi’s epiphany will materially change the quality of Fanta’s life. Only Khady’s story ends with a clear, decisive outcome. All three stories were fantastic; Norah’s was my favorite, because I found Norah’s ambiguous relationship with her father so compelling, but the way NDiaye builds tension and suspense in the other two is just superb.

However, once again I have to note that I was annoyed by the English translation. At this point, maybe I just have to admit defeat when it comes to French. I didn’t like the English translation of La Vengeance m’appartient, either, but that was a different translator (Jordan Stump). If two different translators both produce fairly similar translations of the same author, then I’m willing to admit that the problem is me. I’m by no means fluent in French; I don’t have an inner ear attuned enough to judge French prose for being clunky, or old-fashioned, or exceptionally beautiful. It’s back to the Pevear and Volokhonsky debate all over again: sometimes the original is just plain awkward.

That said, while Fletcher doesn’t seem to have much of his own commentary out in the world, the little I read in this article by Lily Meyer over on Public Books didn’t necessarily endear him to me. I didn’t care for Stump’s writing style in interviews, either, but he at least didn’t come across as ambiguous or even hostile to NDiaye’s writing as Fletcher does here. And I’ll keep throwing myself at the brick walls of NDiaye’s writing because whatever my level of competence in French may be, there is something in her writing that I find magnetic and spooky.

The Iliad, or the Poem of Force

Where to start with this one.

It’s barely a book, really just an essay. And I’m not smart enough to have any kind of insightful commentary on Simone Weil but fuck it, we ball.

I’d been meaning to read Weil for some time, so when my philosophy study group voted on “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” as our November selection, I saw my chance and I took it. Is it her most beginner-friendly work? Who’s to say.

Weil is clearly enamored with The Iliad and heaps no end of praise on it, but she’s also using it to frame a political philosophy thesis: the true driver of history is force, defined as “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” That is the force she refers to in the title of the essay, and her accolades for The Iliad are based in part on her opinion that it is the best, most accomplished depiction of force in Western literature.

Why Weil names this “force” (“la force” in the original French) and not “violence” is a question I wish I had asked the study group because I find myself at a loss for an answer. Maybe because violence is too restrictive a concept to categorize Nazi Germany—it’s hard not to read Weil, a French woman of Jewish background* writing in 1939, and not think about Nazis. But this thing called force is also her response to Marxist and Hegelian dialectics in addition to Nazis, and it also includes violence (or force) deferred: “…the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet. It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it can kill, at many moment, which is to say at every moment. In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone.”

Pretty irrefutable argument. And through her reading of The Iliad, where for Weil its greatness stems from showing how every character on every side is subjected to force, how people find it in themselves to love in the face of force, and how force destroys and renders tragic the things we most value in life, we can understand that Weil is critical of force and believes that we can’t escape history except by somehow transcending force.

None of that has really stopped being relevant, has it?

*Weil’s conversion to Christianity shouldn’t be overlooked, especially considering its influential role in her philosophy, but that particular factor of her birth is important for establishing the precise nature of her relationship to the Nazis and vice versa.

Karavan: Alla dessa trådar

The theme for issue 2/2024 of Karavan was “text och textil,” which led to an interesting mix of fiction focused on textiles as well as how textiles have functioned as vehicles of meaning and narrative.

This issue’s author interview was with Nicaragua’s Sergio Ramírez, and as a result two more books ended up on my TBR (Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea and The Sky Weeps for Me). You don’t usually see commercial genre fiction like mystery thrillers get a lot of discussion space in fancy literature circles (unless they’re Raymond Chandler) so I’m especially curious to see what The Sky Weeps for Me is like. Maybe an exception was made because Ramírez was very clear in the interview that the genre was the best tool he had for conveying political upheaval as he wanted to. Who knows! The other big author feature was a memorial piece on Maryse Condé, who passed away earlier this year. Luckily for me, several of her books are available at the Stockholm library, including a few in the original French.

This issue’s Diary of a Translator feature was from Anna Gustafsson Chen, who is at work on a Swedish translation of Liu Qing’s History Through Words. History is a sprawling novel of political upheaval in 1920s and 1930s Manchuria, so Chen describes her dive into Chinese advertisements, propaganda posters, and the numerous anti-Japanese resistance movements of the time.

The long-form reviews included a pair of novels from Benjamín Labatut, Shehan Karunatilaka’s extremely hyped and much-lauded The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, and a few novels from César Aira. The Labatut review was pretty lukewarm, but I’ve heard a lot about Seven Moons in a lot of different places, so I could be tempted into picking that one up. Aira’s novels were also pretty well reviewed and the one that sounded the most interesting ended up on my TBR. Less a review and more of a news item was a brief piece on the publication of letters between some of the titans of Latin American literature in a collection called Las Cartas del Boom. Interesting to note but currently only available in Spanish, so not much I can do there!

None of the shorter reviews caught my interest, though apparently The Three Body Problem has finally come out in Swedish! (Translated by Anna Gustafsson Chen from the earlier “Diary of a Translator” segment.) The state of science fiction and fantasy published in Swedish, whether originally or in translation, is a bit anemic so it’s encouraging to see huge titles like this get a Swedish release. Less encouraging that it only came out in 2024 (the original was published in 2006; the English translation came out in 2014), but more encouraging again that it’s a translation directly from Mandarin rather than indirectly via the English.

The themed selections took a surprisingly wide and educational tack. The first was a revised and expanded essay from Maria Küchen, originally broadcast on OBS P1, on weaving, stories, and memory: the Andean record-keeping knots known as khipu that we no longer know how to interpret, Malian bógólanfini, the core rope memory that helped send American astronauts to the moon, death shrouds from Windover pond.

The next piece was another author memorial, this time in the form of an interview with author Ericah Gwetai about her late daughter Yvonne Vera, also a writer. Karolina Jeppson visited Gwetai at her home in Zimbabwe to discuss Vera, sewing her own clothing, and the similarities between writing and weaving. Vera’s The Stone Virgins also ended up on my TBR.

The third piece finally delves into literature, with a short story from Karavan favorite Xi Xi, translated into Swedish as “Blusen”: a fantastic monologue from a cotton blouse to its new owner. Karavan features a lot of poetry from Xi Xi that I’ve struggled to enjoy (including this issue), but this little story was a gem and I loved it! Unfortunately, it’s unclear if the collection it was taken from has been translated in its entirety yet, so…that’s all, folks. The final Xi Xi piece in this issue was a collection of teddy bears Xi Xi designed and sewed herself, based on figures out of Chinese history and stories, selected from The Teddy Bear Chronicles.

Back to nonfiction, this time with an essay and artist statement from Marcia Harvey Isaksson. She combines weaving with performance art, and I’m disappointed that I’ve missed some of her most interesting installations.

Some more poetry, this time from Tamer Fathy’s poetry collection Yesterday I Lost A Button. All of the poems are from the perspective of clothing; one of the ones featured in Karavan is available in English: “When Clothes Were Small.”

The next short story was “Mattan,” from Narine Abgarjan, which was so good that I immediately put Abgarjan’s full-length novels on my TBR.

More weaving and multimedia art, this time from Eva Vargö‘s collection of paper weaving. It shouldn’t surprise me that people weave with paper, but there you go. Vargö goes into some detail about the differences in different kinds of paper, and focuses a lot on traditional paper materials from Japan and Korea.

Usually I skip the children’s literature sections, but this time it caught my eye: an interview with Christian Epanya about his latest book, Les rois de la sape, a picture book about sapeurs and La SAPE (Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes). La sape is a cross between a fashion trend and a social movement originating in Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville that has become a part of the larger African diaspora, usually compared to dandyism. It’s even been codefied (somewhat) into, for example, ten commandments of La SAPE. While I don’t have any particular reason to read the book, the article did send me down a fascinating rabbithole and I learned something new.

The education continued with an article from Tina Ignell on different forms of dying and patterns in textiles, from shibori in Japan and bandhani in West Bengal to grave goods in Peru and neckerchiefs in Mora, Sweden.

The next short story from Irenosen Okojie was a Swedish translation of “Synsepalum” by Birgitta Wallin. I don’t know that I cared for it much, but that might have been a matter of translation, so I’m glad that Minor Literature has the English original up for free for comparison.

The final piece on the textiles theme was an essay by Lars Vargö on costumes in kabuki and noh theater, and how their use reflects the different theatrical styles and traditions.

Solid issue! Too many books! Can’t hug every cat!

La Vengeance m’appartient: Translation

La Vengeance m’appartient only has three stars (or close to it) on GoodReads and StoryGraph. I wonder: is it because their userbase is uncomfortable with ambiguous, difficult texts? Or is it because their userbase is, more often than not, reading in English?

I ask because there’s something in the English translation that I found clunky and off-putting that was completely absent in the Swedish. Both of their translators are prolific and well recognized: the English translator is a highly lauded figure in English/French translation and even won an award for his translation of another book by NDiaye, as did the Swedish translator. Is my inner ear not attuned enough to know the difference between elegant and clunky French? Or elegant and clunky Swedish, for that matter?

The point that springs to mind is all the various translations of War and Peace, and the fanfare that met the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. It’s substantially different from older translations, and is often accused of being clunky in comparison. Pevear and Volokhonsky, however, insist that a lot of the original Russian is actually clunky, and that previous translations have done a lot—too much—to smooth it over. And in the middle of all this you have Constance Garnett: linguistic wunderkind? prudish censor? How central should her translations be when it comes to Russian literature in English?

It doesn’t help, either, that I find Stump’s style of writing irritating of its own accord. Maybe I was primed to dislike it because I didn’t bother looking him up until I was already annoyed with the English translation, who knows. But he has plenty of interviews to comb through: Words Without Borders, Center for the Art of Translation, Asymptote, Ploughshares, etc.

I suppose I’ll have to follow this post with a part two where I solicit my francophone friends for their opinions.